They are only 20 kilometers away from the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and they have to walk eight kilometers to the bus station. This is the fate of students in the Košćan settlement in Hadžić. Parents are desperate because no one wants to hear their voice.
In order to get to school, Ajla and Djejla have to walk for kilometers to the bus station. Most of the time, their parents adjust all other responsibilities in order to drive them to school. Enormous money is spent on fuel, and the girls have to wait for hours after the last lesson of school.
“It depends, sometimes I’ll be in the park… where there are drunk people and there are stray dogs… I also go for coffee, but I can’t be there for too many hours, maybe two hours,” says Ajla Aladjuz, and Djejla continues: “I’m on the first shift I finish at 2 pm and then I have to wait until 4 pm, there is no bus. My mom works until 4 p.m. and I’m waiting for her.”
Djejla adds that this way he loses a lot of time, which he then does not have for his hobbies.
That’s how the dreams of little ones are extinguished. One boy’s dream of becoming a boxer is extinguished because it is impossible to get to training in these conditions. A girl’s dream is to go to folklore or volleyball with her friends, too. All because of public transport.
“How do you let a little girl walk seven kilometers? Is it a party game and it is breaking over our children… we are simply looking for an answer to our question. “Children regularly receive a ticket for transportation, which they do not use,” emphasizes Selma Alađuz.
A card that means nothing. GRAS does not operate here. Suad Alađuz drives his two sons to school, so he needs more than 300 marks a month just for fuel. He is outraged, he says, because of the negligence of the cantonal government and the administration of GRAS.
“All this has crossed borders, there is no institution where I have not asked: the school, the ministry, the director of GRAS… We will eventually be forced not to send children to school,” says Suad.
Košćan is not an abandoned place. It’s not where the dirt road is. The old GRAS stickers remain only as a reminder of how many bus routes there used to be. More than 100 primary and secondary school students come from this local community. Azra Selimović’s son is one of them.
“He actually has to get off the bus at 8:15 in the morning, down by Dom, you saw where it is, he has to walk to that location. Afternoon then comes at 17-18h. Thursdays at 6 p.m., for example. Pedestrians” , explains Azra.
That’s the situation when it’s the first shift. When she is in second grade and, for example, she finishes classes at 7 p.m., she will not come home until 9 p.m. Everyone here is wondering: why are they condemned to this attitude of the authorities towards them?
“The problem is big, I can’t even find a job because of it. You are really forced to take your child, whether you have a car or not. Nobody cares about that at all. You can’t just let the child go and you’re forced to leave all your work and wait for several hours because someone doesn’t have a car, so you have to wait for the child to finish school, to pick him up and bring him back,” says Amra Đelko.
The Centrotrans bus comes closest to them and the students walk to this location. GRAS has long been expected to establish a line. The director of this public company says that the current problem is that the tender for the procurement of minibuses failed and that they are now repairing the old ones, and that everything is being done to establish the line as soon as possible. Locals say that they hear sentences like this continuously.
“And when they submit a report to the Council, everything is according to PS, they perform the lines regularly and there are no problems with them, the situation on the field is completely different. Here the people are here. They’re not lying,” points out Sanela Proha, representative of the Košćan Municipal Health Service.
The road in Košćan is extremely good. There is also a bus station there. Citizens are waiting for a bus that will never come.
Source: akta.ba
